How to trim whitespace from the beginning and end of a string with vanilla JS

Let’s imagine you have a string with some extra spaces at the beginning and end of it.

let str = '   I love Cape Cod potato chips.   ';

How would you remove that unneeded whitespace? JavaScript provides three different methods, depending on what you’re trying to do.

The String.trim() method removes leading and trailing whitespace from a string.

// Returns "I love Cape Cod potato chips."
str.trim();

If you only want to remove the leading whitespace, you can instead use the String.trimStart() method.

// Returns "I love Cape Cod potato chips.   "
str.trimStart();

And if you only want to remove the trailing whitespace, you can use the String.trimEnd() method.

// Returns "   I love Cape Cod potato chips."
str.trimEnd();

Here’s a demo.